When Neil LaBute’s neighbors discuss the nature of goodness, they wonder what
it’s good for. The 35-year old director who debuted with last year’s corrosive
In the Company of Men once again waves the red flag in the war between the
sexes. Man’s inhumanity to women seemed the snaky undercurrent of his earlier
picture. Rather, his anti-romantic sparring matches, written in the trim,
acerbic manner of his mentor, David Mamet, express a more universal
hostility—basic human unkindness.

In Your Friends and Neighbors, the cast has doubled to six inconsolable couples. Until the credits roll,
they have no names. Not much is known about their personal backgrounds, given
their professional status. They’re supposed to represent society at its
shallowest, lending a behind-closed-doors peek at our own "friends and
neighbors." LaBute consciously excludes the sort of biographical information
that he badly needs in order to garner sympathy. Instead, these self-obsessed characters
come across as flat and hyper-stylized. We learn more about their pores
through probing, unflattering close-ups. These self-obsessed yuppies seem the
physical embodiment of their chic, showroom apartments (set in an undisclosed
Everycity). Nobody speaks with their fractured pauses and pop-cultural
clichés…unless, of course, they’re spotlit on a stage.
Coming from a thespian background (earning his master’s in drama at NYU and
studying at the Royal Court Theatre in London), LaBute must unlearn rules that
conflict with filmmaking. He’s got to think with his camera. Most of his
material takes place indoors. The settings resemble theatre sets because the
characters hardly move. Shot in wide-angle, waist-level, the actors sit (and
so does the scene). There’s nothing physical for them to focus on. Men and
women woo in a parade of swanky coffee houses, secondhand book stores and
avant-garde galleries, gabbing about their favorite subject: themselves. Each
scene ends with a punctuation note, a particularly scathing bon mot. The
curtain thuds. This predictable rhythm resumes. It brings to mind French
farces (Stiller’s character, a theatre prof, dons a dust-encrusted wig,
spoofing the reference.) Of course, Restoration writers couldn’t pace their
plots without keeping time. When a candle winked out, the scene climaxed.

Company worked well despite a heavy dependence on theatrical techniques. His
verbal feuds had such ferocity, they demanded attention. Inevitably, his
sophomore effort (written before the first film) fails because it lacks the
other’s shock value (and wit). In that case, there was a story to tell, a
"modern immorality" tale that made us think. This time, LaBute’s more
interested in entertaining himself. He’s lost the point of all this carnal
knowledge. Now it seems like macho locker room one-up-manship. While Aaron
Eckhart’s cruel Lothorio represented an all-too familiar, urban breed of
monster, this movie’s miscreant (played by co-producer Jason Patric) tries too
hard to intimidate. He’s a cartoonish baddie who blows up when a ladyfriend
bleeds on his 300-thread sheets. He practices his pillow talk while
masturbating into a tape-recorder. His best bedding was a homosexual gang-rape
in high-school. LaBute makes him a gyno, much too facile as metaphor, tossing
around a plastic anatomical baby like a football.

Ben Stiller, bespectacled and sporting a fungus-like goatee threaded with
gray, talks too much during the deed, so his girlfriend dumps him and switches
sexual orientation. Catherine Keener, a scheming ad writer who scribes copy
for tampon boxes, plays like the boys and pays for it in bed. Natassja Kinski,
her conquest, is a passive-aggressive arm-charm, filtering passes from
everyone. Eckhardt goes against type, packing on extra bloat as the spineless
husband who prefers self-love to his seductive wife, Amy Brenneman. In
Company, the villain was clear. For this sextet, redemption is unlikely. As
exemplified by the final exchange in flagrante delicto, there’s more than a
single monster on the loose. The first is easy to recognize. The other dons a
gentler disguise. Which is worse? The one who confesses his crimes or those
who try to conceal them?

The cast is well-chosen, the script ambitious but flawed. LaBute’s too brainy
for such a sub-bourgeoisie preoccupation with gossipy dialogue, riddled with
cultural allusion. The titles rise over Alex Katz paintings. Is this what the
characters see when they admire an invisible work in the gallery? Or is it us,
the audience, whom they address? A Metallica score blares in the background,
sawed on cellos. It’s as if the director is saying, don’t confuse my work for
art with a capital A. Yet it still prides itself on its own social
significance. "Are you good?" someone asks Patric. He considers the question.
"Good for what?" he says. Truth isn’t beauty. That’s all we need to know.

[rating: 2 of 4 stars]

Crissa-Jean Chappell works for the Sun Post in South Beach (Miami), Florida.